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"Only the Pac-12 National Network will be carried, with the remainder of the content available on overflow channels."

"The regional channels will be available online via Pac-12 Now at a later date after the Pac-12 and Dish get everything installed in an orderly fashion."

"There could be one piece of bad news: If the original uplink was true, channel 413 was meant for standard definition ... However, it seems like the hope in the Pac-12 offices is that high-definition will be available soon, if not today."

So... it would seem like the national channel full-time, plus some part-time feeds for overflow games (presumably for football and maybe even basketball unlike the Big Ten deal).

Big never used the overflow for basketball and never planed for it (at network launch cable systems did not have the bandwidth for the alt basketball feeds so they never planed to have them)

No I don't think they will be HD. And only one Fresno State game? Big Fail, don't expect this to last.

No FTA, we'll be paying for it though.

If you've been researching... you would also see that the PAC-12 stated on their site (can't remember if it was Facebook or their main Web site) that Dish wanted to get the SD feeds up in time for Saturday's games because that's all they could get up in the ~12 hours they had once the deal was signed.

HD feeds are coming.. perhaps in time for next weekend.

As they say, Rome wasn't built in a day.

Given that Dish is the only national provider to sign for PAC-12 (all the other contracts are with cable companies for various local regional distribution) they had to work all the infrastructure and the PAC-12 may not have even been able to provide an HD feed directly to Dish on that short of notice.

Given that Dish is the only national provider to sign for PAC-12 (all the other contracts are with cable companies for various local regional distribution) they had to work all the infrastructure and the PAC-12 may not have even been able to provide an HD feed directly to Dish on that short of notice.

The SD Pac-12 feed was only put up by DISH for testing on Wednesday. This has been one of the quicker channel adds, from an uplink point of view.

The SD Pac-12 feed was only put up by DISH for testing on Wednesday. This has been one of the quicker channel adds, from an uplink point of view.

That's what I was thinking... usually we see channels in testing for a week or more before they launch them.

The only real exception I can remember was Voom... but that was a cheat since Dish bought the satellite that Voom had been using, so technically it was just a little re-routing and pushing authorization for the channels out to Dish receivers... they already knew the channels were uplinking properly from the Voom side.

Also, to be fair... we don't know how long they tested and tweaked that prior to when the channels launched. From a customer perspective we all kind of found out about it the weekend and they launched late Saturday night I believe... so it seemed like a 24 hour turnaround, but they might have been playing with things prior to that to see what they needed to do.

I still think it's funny, and not taking a jab at DirecTV because I 100% get why they didn't want the original PAC-12 deal offered to them. Dish probably benefited from DirecTV backing out and PAC-12 being desperate to go national...

But... I remember seeing the article that read "Dish is the only major provider without PAC-12"... how that worm turned!

The only real exception I can remember was Voom... but that was a cheat since Dish bought the satellite that Voom had been using, so technically it was just a little re-routing and pushing authorization for the channels out to Dish receivers... they already knew the channels were uplinking properly from the Voom side.

Also, to be fair... we don't know how long they tested and tweaked that prior to when the channels launched. From a customer perspective we all kind of found out about it the weekend and they launched late Saturday night I believe... so it seemed like a 24 hour turnaround, but they might have been playing with things prior to that to see what they needed to do.

JohnH first saw the uplink on 4-29-05 ... the same day the press release came out. The channels became active on 5-1-05. The Voom satellite service went dark the same day (5-1-05) at 3am ET.

DISH can uplink to a transponder without putting the channels in the master table that we look at for Uplink Activity - and they can place channels in Uplink Activity that do not exist. So there is no easy way of telling when the channels were testing. I don't have "Uplink Activity" reports for the Voom system to know if they were the same transponders or if Voom's uplink went dark and DISH's uplink lit up or what went on. But there was some advance notice (behind the scenes) knowing that the deal was pending ... and DISH did not have to figure out where to put the channels.

I would not say that there has never been an immediate uplink (added and available the same day or the same moment). I see that often in the Uplink Activity ... but it usually relates to new mirrors of old channels (such as taking a national HD channel and adding it to the Puerto Rico HD service).

Exactly... for as much as I wanted HD... If that meant screwed-up HD, they would have fielded a lot of complaints.

To be honest, I think the only ball-dropped here was what you have already mentioned... all the Hopper folks not being told what channel those alternates were on their receivers. Otherwise, I thought it was a pretty smooth launch for the SD feeds and they have at least a week here to get things right for HD by Saturday.

The only game I actually wanted to see was Duke vs Stanford, but it was a blowout so I was ok not having it in HD since I tuned out.

I thought it was kinda ironic when I was watching some game on saturday and the "ESPN" bus/RV was in the parking lot of the stadium (at least I think it was the ESPN RV), and it had a big sign on it for Directv, "The only place to watch All of college football"...........heh except pac-12 of course Now if we could only get Dish to launch a part-time Fox College Sports channel (FCS), like D* has.

One epic fail from saturday WERE the alternate games on the ALT channels, the 3pm games all started w/ the Cal Bears game instead of the games they were soppose to be. At some point, the correct feeds were uplinked but I'm sure for some subs, that was annoying.

PAC-12 Network will be in HD as early as this week. We are working as fast as possible to make HD available.In the interest of getting content to customers as quickly as possible this past weekend after an agreement was reached on Friday, we launched in SD because the technology was not in place to deliver HD that quickly.

If I'm guessing... My gut says we will see the HD feeds before we see the streaming. PAC-12 might even have to update their mobile app before allowing that... whereas the HD feed uplink is more of a business as-usual thing that they can probably do quicker.

If I'm guessing... My gut says we will see the HD feeds before we see the streaming. PAC-12 might even have to update their mobile app before allowing that... whereas the HD feed uplink is more of a business as-usual thing that they can probably do quicker.

I would hope that the main channel (413) gets "promoted" to full-time status rather than being part-time... otherwise the PAC-12 didn't get the same deal that the Big Ten did with a full-time HD feed.

BIG10 HD is also encoded as "part time" ... what that does is place the HD channel next to the SD channel in the guide instead of replacing the SD with HD. The setup is the same for BIG10 and PAC12.

The full EPG is a positive sign ... but the negative sign is that the PAC12 HD channel is currently on transponders that only have part time HD channels. I would feel better about it being 24x7 HD if it were on a regular transponder.

Time will tell. Either the EPG will be fixed or the channel will light up 24x7.

Wondering if those ALT channels will ultimately get grouped with 413 for Hopper customers like they did for the Big Ten grouping.

Unfortunately DISH cannot do that. A channel number can only be used for a real channel (such as 439 BIG10) or an expandable EPG (such as 438 BIG10). 412 could become the grouped channel if all the other RSNs are taken off 412-xx (please) or moved to a different grouped channel location.

Wow, I really did not expect Dish to be a satellite sports leader in any market (maybe parity with DirecTV). Clearly, the Dish advertising deal at the schools justified the Pac-12 fee they requested. From the Pac-12 perspective, they had to get a national satellite carrier (and no one expected Dish to pull ahead of DirecTV on sports which is what the false rumors had to be around). We know both DirecTV and Dish play hardball with negotations (as they should).

In So Cal, the timing is vastly interesting because we still have the Lakers networks in negotiations. I cannot think Dish will go for only Pac-12 and not make a deal for Lakers. However, I am concerned that this Pac-12 deal will cause DirecTV to go for the Lakers network to avoid the sports shift over to Dish. There is definitely no mutual deal for Dish because Time Warner is not going to give that anything except of course from local Dish ad time (which they already get from most cable networks anyway).

Oh and the cost next year for the 120+, I would be very afraid personally. However, any customer who must have their Pac-12 is likely willing to pay for it anyway, so this is likely the type of customer Dish wanted. Oh, and if they like any international programming, even more fabulous, that average revenue per customer will do very well.